I had draughted half a grumble about a Panorama episode's twaddle on Britain allegedly drinking itself to death, but then I forgot where I left my blog, and indeed its password, and now I'm not sure whether it's worth complaining about a programme aired months ago.
I might do it anyway, because without it -and this preface- there likely wouldn't be much of an update here at all.
By, “draughted half a grumble” I mean that I'd smeared a few keywords over a Word document, leaving me with the impression that I'd watched Panorama, it'd been about booze, and it'd annoyed me. And by, “Word” I mean... whatever I'm using now that I've gone all Linuxy. Evidently I can't be bothered to look up to the top left of the screen to read, “LibreOffice Writer”.
From the aforementioned half-grumble/keywords I can discern that the programme featured, amongst other things:
*The assertion that people are getting liver disease younger and in larger numbers than was the case thirty years ago
*Well-known reptilian David Cameron going back on everything he said about booze before the election
All, of course, presented in between dramatic scenes of projectile falling and repetitive cursing, before a cheekily slipped in reference to the fact that:
*Alcohol consumption in the UK is actually in decline
Oh.
But we shouldn't let that deflect us from our sensational Crusade, for it gets middle-aged slurry-brains fired-up to see footage of young people in a state, so that they may say, “Ooh, I didn't see scenes like this in my day!”
Yes you fucking did, you just don't remember it because you were pissed!
In more important and up to date news, I've been a bit ill, and now I'm mostly better. Another mucus-coated, sleep-deprived victory.
Meanwhile, there's still little sign of the London Congolese protests in the mainstream (UK) media, so far as I've noticed. Lots about demonstrations and harsh police crack-downs in other people's countries, and the odd bit about their oil and their disputed elections, but rather less about (Sub-Saharan) Africans, even/especially the ones who're here, and their coltan and disputed elections... which is depressing though predictable.
This is the bit where I try to justify the laptop I'm using to post this blog by insisting that an individual dropping out of modern society is unlikely to help anybody else.
The (barely) reported focus of some protesters on coltan, and on shoppers rushing to buy their smart-phones and game stations, seems fair enough, to me, but I don't want to just live as if the 'information age' isn't in full swing around me any more than I want to go vegan or forswear all motorised transport. Instead, while I don't have or want a car, I happily (wait, happily? I don't do things happily, that was misleading, sorry) use public transport, and I eat eggs from chickens in the village, and I have a (decidedly not smart) mobile phone that just happens to be older than many primary school children (I intend to keep it until it no longer works).
My feeling is of course that, once again, it's the market principle and the growth economy ideal -and their advocates- to blame for the perpetuation of the Congo's assorted woes and by extension mass arrests in London. When the latest games console comes out the price of coltan spikes as millions rush to buy it ASAP, and the fighting to control tenuously grasped Central African deposits is fuelled. There's nothing inherently wrong with owning a phone, if you ask me (at least no more than there is contradiction in drinking coffee while expressing frustration at the socialisation of risk on private profiteering, Mensch), but there's plenty wrong with the Gadget Show. There's nothing inherently wrong with the internal combustion engine, but [censored for Top Gear fury]. And there's nothing wrong with scrambled eggs, but the Colonel can definitely improve the rest of the world by fucking off back to Kentucky.
I suppose what I'm saying is that I think you're a wanker, and I'm going to have a mince pie and maybe play a game on a computer that's as old as I am but still works fine and definitely doesn't need replacing every two years just to sustain a fundamentally unsustainable economic model while killing as many innocent brown people as possible and keeping the fuck up with the bastarding Joneses, who, quite frankly, can go and fuck themselves with the latest in fairy lights.
Er, I mean, play in the snow! Jesus Christ, snow!
